I want a more stable/reliable external storage device other than WDs portable and desktop storage options. I’m interested in the caviar black but know very little about external enclosures…any recommendations? And should the enclosure have a fan or does it not make a difference…seems there are both options so obviously a fan isn’t always necessary?

* backup >> if you want reliability, in case of WD a black/blue one might do, maybe an enclosure with fan migth be recommended. I think it is a waste to put one of those in an enclosure, but i might be wrong. But a black is ‘better’ (my opinion) as a hard drive.

2 - Do you want a non-wd enclosure + hdd combo (be prepared to get seagate/hellgate)?

*I dont like all book / studio / etc from wd, but i do like their hard disks…

3 - for small disks (up to 500gb i think) a ‘normal’ passport (without any un-feature, just mass storage) might be the best. these dont need a power supply.

General:

* keep in mind the power supply of the enclosure (in some cases an extra ps unit might be very usefull)

* there are dual disk enclosures, these comes with fans i think, nextar has one.

* an enclosure might fall to the floor or have some other type of accident, so putting the best disk might not

make it undestructible. Also, how many years is it expected to be usable?

I have two nexstar cx usb+esata, with a wd 2.0 TB Caviar Green, one for the WDTV and the other is for backup. When they are not in use, the parking feature triggers and they do not get hot, even after copying +60GB of data. But keep in my that it is my experience only. i might be wrong.

I’ve been thinking of buying an internal hard drive, like the caviar black, and dropping it into an external enclosure to be used strictly as a back-up drive for my computer and other portables. I also am not impressed with any of WD’s pre-packaged external drives like My Book or Elements drives…almost seems hit or miss on the type of quality you’ll get. Anyway, the caviar black seems to get great reviews across the board and I’m definitely looking for reliability. I usually back up my data a couple of times a month, and that’s it, so I would expect this back-up drive to last for 5+ years. I’ve had WD and other brand portables last that long, so I was thinking a caviar black should easily make it that far, especially based on the infrequency of usage I plan for it. Again, I want reliability. I have had one portable go out on me and spent close to $3000 for data recovery…don’t want to go down that road again.

If that’s the only copy you have, and $3000 worth of data recovery was necessary, then it wasn’t a “backup” it was just “storage”.

A “backup” is a second, safe copy. And most people who have been in your position don’t even trust the backup… they backup the backup.

All drives will fail sooner or later. The MTBF is just that… the Mean Time Between Failures. It’s an average. You could spend a bajillion dollars on the “best” hard drive in existence and it could fail in 5 minutes… the 5-year (or whatever) average is just an average… for every person getting 10 or 15 years out of the drive, somebody is having it die prematurely. And for every person having it die prematurely, somebody is getting unbelievable life out of it.

All manufacturers, not just WD, are happy to tell you the averages… what you should “expect” as an average lifetime, and will replace any drive that fails while still under warranty. But none will guarantee the data on desktop drives.

Anybody can tell you “I’ve had good luck with brand X, but stay away from brand Y because I’ve had Z drives fail on me in the last W years”, and someone else will tell you the opposite.

They all seem to have about the same industry averages (for the same type of drive) and similar warranties. For all I know, they’re all made in the same factory anyways.